It’s no secret that capitalism basically ruined geek culture by deliberately milking franchises, manufacturing and pandering to audiences with zero standards (lookin at you Marvel, AAA gaming), and sacrificing performance over whatever trendy AaA bullshit there is. I just got a shower thought, does this apply to everything else in general, one example I can think of is comedy nowadays (though YT’s terrible moderation didn’t help in ruining it), fashion, electronics nowadays, and even fuckin activism.
Enshittification and planned obsolescence are absolutely different things from this, though they all do make products worse.
The phenomenon of major producers of media “playing it safe” and taking options meant to please the mass, general public at the expense of catering to fans, and in turn making milquetoast products that no one is really happy about definitely happens in other forms of media, and did not originate with nerd culture. Movies and specifically Hollywood has been doing it for a while, “Best Seller” listed books are guilty of it, and it’s pretty much genre agnostic. It’s a result of producers being unwilling to take risks, and the more money being pumped into something, generally the worse it gets.